American Hotel Register To Build In Vernon Hills

American Hotel Register Co., the world's largest distributor of supplies for hotels, is starting construction Friday on a $50 million headquarters complex in Vernon Hills.

Ground will be broken initially for a 258,000-square-foot regional warehouse and distribution facility to be completed next summer. The next phase will be a six-story, 277,000- square-foot headquarters building scheduled to be finished early in 1998.

The new company campus will be on 71 acres in the Continental Executive Parke on Milwaukee Avenue south of Town Line Road.

Thomas Leahy, executive vice president of the 131-year-old family-owned company, said the current headquarters in Northbrook are overcrowded and divided in four different locations.

He said he had originally hoped to move company headquarters to a site at the former Glenview Naval Air Station, which is being redeveloped for business, residential and recreational use, but the company couldn't wait for it to be ready. American Hotel's Northbrook headquarters are adjacent to the old military base property.

"We really should have moved out in 1994," said Leahy. "We're just crammed here. Sales keep increasing."

The company, which has 600 employees in Northbrook and 125 more around the world, has added more than 150 workers this year and expects to expand to more than 800 by 1998, Leahy said.

The company supplies more than 100,000 hotels around the world, distributing products from more than 2,500 manufacturers. Many of the products are made from American Hotel's proprietary designs.

One of its popular products is its 2,000-page catalog, which contains most items seen in a typical hotel room, from ice buckets to shower curtains to shoe-shine cloths. It also offers hotel business forms, the barriers that form lanes in front of registration desks, and a multitude of other necessities for the hospitality industry.

Leahy said one of the reasons for the company's expansion is that it is adding an outside sales force to supplement sales from the catalog.